(Corine Gatti, Headline USA) When many Americans were struggling to pay their bills under government mandates during the COVID pandemic, authoritarians like Dr. Anthony Fauci profited from the pandemic through royalty checks.
Leaders of the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, including Fauci, made big bucks from the pandemic, according to information from OpenTheBooks. More than 1,500 unredacted records uncovered the disturbing truth that officials profited from the virus that has killed thousands of people, Town Hall reported.
Fauci collected 58 royalty payments for allowing companies to use their COVID-19 vaccines, which in return was developed with funding from U.S. taxpayers by private pharmaceutical firms, the news outlet noted.
Fauci, who directed funds to the Wuhan Institute of Virology to research the Coronavirus, also collected 37 payments from three different entities between 2010 and 2021, including 15 from Santa Cruz Biotechnology. The names and license numbers for each payment were not initially released, which could indicate potential conflicts of interest. Furthermore, Fauci did not donate his royalties to charity, despite making a promise to do so.
“As the most recognized official at NIH, Dr. Anthony Fauci was the face of the third-party royalties controversy. But our investigation was about a lot more than any single scientist,” OpenTheBooks.com CEO Adam Andrzejewski said in a statement.
Through the Freedom of Information Act, 56,000 transactions were recorded, tallying over $325 million paid to the so-called experts. Moreover, scientists from the National Institutes of Health earned in excess of $325 million in royalties from Chinese and Russian entities, as well as pharmaceutical companies, in the span of a decade, the New York Post reported.
“The NIH continues to refuse to voluntarily divulge the names of scientists who receive royalties and from which companies over the period of time from 2010 to 2016, 27,000 royalty payments were paid to 1800 NIH employees,” Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said in 2022.
Paul also referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for lying to Congress regarding government funding of Chinese labs. He recently asked the Senate to mandate royalty disclosures from federal employees. But was shot down in committee by Democrats and Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska.
“Taxpayers and Congress itself are left in the dark when trying to assess conflicts of interest,” Paul said in a July Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee hearing.
